The White Mr. Longfellow | Page 3

gently
rejected. He could not do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not
suffered to feel that I had done a presumptuous thing. I can see him
now, as he looked up from the proof-sheets on the round table before
him, and over at me, growing consciously smaller and smaller, like
something through a reversed opera-glass. He had a shaded drop-light
in front of him, and in its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head
had a dignity peculiar to him.
All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and
good, for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the
nature of the man. His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and
wore his hair long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but
mildly leonine, as the old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark. Once
Sophocles, the ex- monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at
Harvard, came in for supper, after the reading was over, and he was
leonine too, but of a fierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow's
mildness. I remember the poet's asking him something about the
punishment of impaling, in Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical
gleam of his fiery eyes, "Unhappily, it is obsolete." I dare say he was
not so leonine, either, as he looked.
When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow
resonant murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn. His voice
was very lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early
effect with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner
of the fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat.
The poet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the
meetings of the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment
with that dear old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves
heard in concert, one could not tell which it was that most took our
thoughts from the text of the Paradiso. When the duet opened,
Longfellow would look up with an arch recognition of the fact, and
then go gravely on to the end of the canto. At the close he would speak
to his friend and lead him out to supper as if he had not seen or heard
anything amiss.

III.
In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of
my youthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen. But
Longfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying
and delightful things, and from time to time he addressed himself to me,
so that I should not feel left out. He did not talk much himself, and I
recall nothing that he said. But he always spoke both wisely and simply,
without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, but with
something that I must call quality for want of a better word; so that at a
table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassiz beamed,
he cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim all these
vivider luminaries. While he spoke you did not miss Fields's story or
Tom Appleton's wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with his
unequalled intuitions.
The supper was very plain: a cold turkey, which the host carved, or a
haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a platter of quails, with
a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect
vintages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with the
inspiration of affection. We usually began with oysters, and when some
one who was expected did not come promptly, Longfellow invited us to
raid his plate, as a just punishment of his delay. One evening Lowell
remarked, with the cayenne poised above his bluepoints, "It's
astonishing how fond these fellows are of pepper."
The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was perhaps not wide enough
awake to repress an "Ah?" of deep interest in this fact of natural history,
and Lowell was provoked to go on. "Yes, I've dropped a red pepper pod
into a barrel of them, before now, and then taken them out in a solid
mass, clinging to it like a swarm of bees to their queen."
"Is it possible?" cried the old friend; and then Longfellow intervened to
save him from worse, and turned the talk.
I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, for I find that only a

few fragments of it have caught in my memory, and that the sieve
which should have kept the gold has let it wash away with the gravel. I
remember once